By happy arrangement, each of the acts playing here was better than the last, at least by my lights (the squealing teenage girls who basically totally lost it while Phoenix were on stage, say, may well have begged to differ). The New York Dolls were quite good albeit totally not my kind of thing - they were into what they were doing, anyway (trashy rock n roll - equally parts Van Halen and the Stooges), and didn't seem to mind the relative lack of audience at that point. Phoenix were okay as well - I'd only heard "Too Young" and a couple of others before, but it turned out that I'd gained a pretty fair idea of what they were about...slightly disco-y of-the-moment indie-rock with an eye to the mainstream. All of their songs kind of sounded the same and they were pretty Killers-esque in places, but you know, they were okay.
So anyway, between Phoenix and Jarvis Cocker, we met up with a friend of Nenad's (one Steve) who got us into the seated area in front, which was seriously something like a hundred times better. Hardly anyone was sitting down, with most folks standing near the front, but the rising 'bowl' arrangement of the stadium meant that anyone standing on any of the steps had a brilliant view from only a few metres away - it was grand. Jarvis, impossibly thin, was ace - put on a real show, complete with constant jerky 'dancing', karate kicks, wriggling around on the ground, and, at one point, an extended swing and hang from one of the giant speakers, plus plenty of witty banter between songs. And the music itself was tops too - I hadn't heard any of his solo stuff before, but it seemed very much like Different Class era Pulp (I've had "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E." stuck in my head since the show, and many of the songs have stayed with me from that one hearing (the "black magic" one was cool, and of course the magnificent show-closing anthem "Cunts Are Still Running The World" (it may have a different title than those words of the chorus, but I doubt it)). Wonderful!
And, finally, the whole reason I'd gone along - the Pixies. And they were just great, pure and simple. Rattling through all of their famous songs ("Monkey Gone To Heaven" and "Wave Of Mutilation" thrown in very early on; "Here Comes Your Man" flood-lit with rainbow coloured lighting to go with the joy it brought somewhere in the middle; "Debaser" and "Where Is My Mind" nearer the end (and "Gigantic" to round off the encore)), and doing so with both a remarkable tightness and an air of loving every minute of what they were doing, it was an honest to goodness live music experience, borne upwards by the anticipation and appreciation of the crowd. Black Francis (hard to think of him in those terms, having been long accustomed to "Frank Black") sang and screamed just as he does on record, Kim Deal was just hella cool, and the four of them really seemed like a band; more than that, they really seemed like the Pixies. The sound was great, the guitars tearing away (though I'd somehow expected them to be rougher-sounding live), and I realised for the first time just what monsters of anthems some of their songs are (I've always thought that the production on Doolittle, the only of their records that I've listened to a lot, does the band no favours at all). I like the Pixies without ever having been fanatical about them, but their set the other night was really something else, both on its own terms and for the new life with which it's imbued their songbook and the band itself for me.
(w/ Nenad)
